Culture, Cognition, and Computational Methods

Marshall Taylor is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also an affiliate in the Center for the Study of Social Movements (CSSM), a doctoral affiliate with the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and coordinating editor for American Sociological Review. Prior to coming to Notre Dame, Marshall earned an M.A. in Sociology from The University of Memphis (2014) and a B.S. in Music Business from Middle Tennessee State University (2012).

His research addresses questions of how culture affects what individual and collective actors perceive, attend to, and evaluate. He is especially interested in how culture impacts cognition in the political sphere. In particular, he examines how material conditions, community contexts, and structural factors influence what protestors and social movement organizations end up perceiving and paying attention to. This guiding interest in cultural cognition has motivated and informed a number of projects, including studies of dual-process models of attention and sense-making during attempts at protest innovation, shame-pride schemas in white nationalist music, the discursive constraints of micro-level racial formation schemas, the cognitive and socioemotional dynamics of macro-level cultural change, dual-process models of cognition in cultural theory, and the intersections between cultural sociology and cognitive neuroscience, among others. His research makes use of a wide range of methodological tools, from text mining and network analysis to historical methods and traditional statistical modeling.

In his dissertation, he examines the contextual, cultural, and social-psychological mechanisms accounting for the distribution of attention of white nationalist organizations (WNOs) in the U.S. South to specific grievances and to other members of their social movement field. His current and forthcoming work can be found in outlets such as Sociological Theory, Poetics, Journal of Classical Sociology, Deviant Behavior, and the Stata Journal.